• In the AI gold rush, Nvidia is selling picks, investing in mines, and bankrolling prospectors.
• That's according to Rob Lalka, a business professor and Big Tech expert.
• Mark Cuban and Michael Burry have warned the AI industry's reliance on Nvidia makes it vulnerable.

Nvidia is playing many positions on the AI pitch, a leading business professor says.

"If AI is a modern-day gold rush, then Nvidia is not only selling the picks; they're also shareholders in the mines themselves, and now they're becoming the bank that's lending to all the prospectors," Rob Lalka told Business Insider in an email.

Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University and the author of "The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power," described Nvidia's meteoric rise over the past two decades, from making graphics cards for video games to becoming the world's most valuable company and the linchpin of the AI boom.

Nvidia has invested or committed tens of billions of dollars to OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, and has equity stakes in scores of AI startups that buy its hardware, Lalka said.

The chipmaker also holds stakes in data center specialists that need its processors, such as CoreWeave and Nebius, he continued.

Lalka highlighted Nvidia's latest financing agreement with some of Wall Street's biggest names, including Apollo and KKR, to raise $500 billion for AI infrastructure built around Nvidia chips.

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia's web of deals has made it the beating heart of the AI boom, as it sells the semiconductors that power the technology, and invests in and finances the array of companies buying its chips.

Several high-profile commentators have warned that the AI ecosystem's reliance on Nvidia could cause problems.

Mark Cuban, the tech billionaire of "Shark Tank" fame, recently posted on X that Nvidia is playing a similar role to the IPO market during the dot-com boom as it's "funding everyone and anyone."

"One breakthrough in another chip provider, or a misstep, and it all could crumble," Cuban added. "It's truly scary."

Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame who called the subprime mortgage crisis, has used the same analogy as Lalka.

He wrote in November that, like Cisco during the dot-com boom, Nvidia was "at the center of it all, with the picks and shovels for all and the expansive vision to go with it."

Burry recently posted on X that Nvidia is "overreaching" as it hustles to push circular spending to "biblical proportions."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has acknowledged just how reliant the AI boom and the global economy are on his company's success. Describing online memes on the topic in November, he said: "We're basically holding the planet together — and it's not untrue."

Nvidia has broadly met sky-high expectations so far. It grew revenue by 85% year-on-year to about $82 billion in the three months ended April 26, fueling a 211% surge in net income to $58 billion.

• Mark Cuban said AI agents will reduce workdays by an hour.
• He said smart companies would reward employees using AI with more time daily.
• Other executives, like Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon, have talked about AI helping shrink workweeks.

Mark Cuban said AI agents will slash an hour of work from typical workdays.

In an X post on Sunday, the billionaire investor wrote that "smart, bigger companies" will let their employees create and use AI agents to improve their productivity.

But he said that more importantly, "they will reduce their work day by an hour to start."

He said that the employees will work one less hour per day while earning the same pay, adding that companies should "reward people doing the daily with more time."

AI agents work as virtual assistants that can complete tasks from start to finish autonomously, without needing user prompts.

Cuban's comments came from one of his several posts on AI on Sunday. In an earlier post, he said he was not an AI "doomer" and did not think the rise of AI would lead to mass unemployment.

"Over time the same shit is available to everyone. The early adopters, that iterated and executed the best, were the winners," he wrote.

Cuban's comments on shorter work days fall in line with those from other tech executives.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in 2024 said that AI avatars would be able to handle everyday tasks like attending meetings, helping to shorten workweeks to three or four days. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon both said in 2023 that AI will lead society to a three or 3.5-day workweek.

Cuban, a former "Shark Tank" investor, has been AI-forward in his recent posts on X. In an interview that aired in February, he said AI has ushered in an era where "some kid in a basement" with a good idea could transform the industry.

Cuban has also talked about AI agents, saying in December that new graduates should go for small to medium businesses and help them adopt AI agents, a task that big companies don't need them to do.

While AI agents have been the latest productivity buzzword, research has found that they still require plenty of human intervention. A Workday survey in January showed that nearly 40% of AI's value is lost to rework and misalignment, due to workers having to check for errors and hallucinations.

Another survey, published in the Harvard Business Review earlier this month, found that some employees are experiencing "AI brain fry," mental fog from using too many AI tools at once.

• Mark Cuban said he bought a Mac Mini to fight a surge of AI-generated emails.
• He said he is training AI to auto-unsubscribe from spam flooding his inbox.
• Cuban believes AI outreach is a trial phase, and response rates will likely eventually drop.

Mark Cuban says the rise of AI-generated cold emails has gotten so overwhelming that he is now fighting back with AI of his own.

Speaking on the live-streamed tech show TBPN on Thursday, the billionaire investor said he recently bought a Mac Mini to help manage the growing flood of inbound messages.

"I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac Mini," Cuban said.

Beyond AI-generated emails, he said the issue is unwanted email subscriptions.

"It's not even like the cold emails because that's pretty obvious," Cuban said. "It's people subscribing me to shit."

His fix, he said, is to use AI to automate the cleanup.

Cuban said he is training systems to take advantage of Gmail's built-in unsubscribe button, effectively creating a loop where AI filters out AI-generated noise.

"You just got to train it to hit the unsubscribe button," he said. "Then, I just review it and all that shit, so it's still a work in progress, but at least I have a path."

Cuban didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comments.

A 'trial and error phase'

The approach reflects a broader shift in how executives are using AI to manage their inboxes.

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky has said he uses Microsoft's Copilot for "almost every" high-stakes message, and executives across industries, from tech to retail, recently told Business Insider's Ana Altchek that they rely on AI for day-to-day communications and reviewing documents.

Cuban framed the current moment as a trial-and-error phase, where people are testing what works and what doesn't.

"We're in that trial and error phase where people are like, 'We're going to try it, see what happens,'" he said, adding that response rates will likely fall as more AI-generated messages flood inboxes.

"Then they'll get bored, and then it'll drop off," he added.

• Mark Cuban thinks humanoid robots will have a short lifespan.
• He said instead robots and spaces will be co-designed, and they won't necessarily look like humans.
• Tesla and OpenAI are among the companies investing in humanoid robots.

Mark Cuban believes in a future where humans live alongside robots, just not the ones you're probably picturing.

"Everybody's making this push for humanoid robots. I think they might have a 5-year lifespan, and then they'll fail miserably. Maybe 10," Cuban said Thursday on the live-streamed tech show TBPN.

Humanoid robots have plenty of fans, including Elon Musk, who has said he believes Tesla's Optimus could be the company's future. Business Insider reported in January that OpenAI had quietly built up a humanoid robotics lab last year.

But Cuban said he thinks co-designing spaces and robots would be better than simply making robots that mimic humans and fit into the world as it currently exists.

"I've heard people say, 'Well, a house is a house, you need a humanoid.' I think houses are going to be redesigned completely," he said.

For example, he said there could be robots that look like spiders or ants, capable of lifting and carrying things, while the house could be designed so that the pantry, refrigerator, and washing machine are hidden, with the robots primarily interacting with them, while the actual living space is used by people.

"The robots aren't going to be full-form humanoids. They're going to be whatever the optimal shape is," Cuban said. "You design the house to fit the robot, and you design the robot to fit the house."

He also pointed to Amazon's use of robots in its warehouses, noting they are not humanoids carrying boxes around. Amazon has said it has over 1 million robots that sort, lift, and carry packages. None of them looks like a human.

Still, major companies like Tesla and OpenAI, as well as smaller startups, continue to invest in developing humanoids. An executive at Agility Robotics, which has deployed its humanoids at Amazon and Toyota, told Business Insider its robots could step in to fill manufacturing roles that humans don't want.

"This re-shoring of manufacturing in the US is going to only occur through a combination of human employment and automation technology, like humans and robotics," he said.

Cuban did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.